The Boy in the Burning House

by Tim Wynne-Jones

  The Boy in the Burning House

  Tim Wynne-Jones

  An Edgar Award Winner

  Two years after his father’s mysterious disappearance, Jim Hawkins is coping — barely. Underneath, he’s frozen in uncertainty and grief. What did happen to his father? Is he dead or just gone? Then Jim meets Ruth Rose. Moody, provocative, she’s the bad-girl stepdaughter of Father Fisher, Jim’s father’s childhood friend and the town pastor, and she shocks Jim out of his stupor when she tells him her stepfather is a murderer. “Don’t you want to know who he murdered?” she asks. Jim doesn’t. Ruth Rose is clearly crazy — a sixteen-year-old misfit. Yet something about her fierce conviction pierces Jim’s shell. He begins to burn with a desire for the truth, until it becomes clear that it may be more unsettling than he can bear. What is the real meaning of the strange prayers Father Fisher intones behind the door of his private sanctuary? Why does Ruth Rose suddenly disappear? And what really happened thirty years ago when a boy died in a burning house?

  The Boy in the Burning House is the winner of the 2002 Edgar Award for Best Young Adult Mystery.

  Tim Wynne-Jones

  THE BOY IN THE BURNING HOUSE

  A Novel

  This book is for Magdalene with love and admiration

  To dig or not to dig, that is the question.

  From The Prospectors’ Soliloquy

  Author’s Note

  Readers lucky enough to know Perth and its eastern Ontario environs may notice a similarity to the town of Ladybank and North Blandford Township, the fictional setting of this story. That passing resemblance does not, however, extend to the characters, all of whom are completely fictional. I have certainly never met nor heard tell of a man quite like Father Fisher. Certainly not in these parts.

  PROLOGUE

  In a windowless room off the kitchen hallway, Father Fisher did his praying. It had once been a pantry but there was no food in it anymore, just food for thought. That’s what Father liked to say. Ruth Rose couldn’t care less about his religious books, his tracts, the Acts and Epistles of the Apostles. The letters she was after weren’t so highminded.

  Somebody was trying to blackmail Father.

  She wasn’t a complete fool, no matter what anybody said. She didn’t expect it would be easy to find proof and no one was going to believe her without it. So she searched when and where she could, and watched and listened.

  It was after midnight. She sat in the broom closet. The closet smelled of vinegar and detergent, of Windex and Pledge. She had the door open a crack. Street light sifted through the back door window. She rocked back and forth, concentrating.

  He was in there, across the narrow hall, in his own darkness.

  He hadn’t shut the door all the way. She could hear the old oak prayer-stall creak under his weight. How penitent he sounded, with his God this and God that. “I have sinned,” he said. “I come before you, O, God, with a heavy heart,” he said. “Empty me, O, Lord,” he said. “Lighten me.”

  He mumbled, snuffled a bit. She tuned him in like a night radio station transmitting from a long way off. His voice, pulpit-tempered and sermon-strong, quivered and quavered around the edges. He was agitated, whining. Good.

  “Take me back,” he said. His voice became trancelike. Praying did that to him, sometimes. She had watched him sway in church as if under a spell, but that was mostly holy show for the congregation. It was only in the praying room that he gave voice to his deeper secrets. They crawled out of the cave of his mouth in whispers and groans.

  “Help me…”

  His voice cracked, changed. Ruth Rose held her breath.

  “Tabor, can you keep a secret?”

  It was not his voice. Somewhere down inside his massive frame, Father had dug up the voice of a boy.

  “Pssst!” he hissed, and the sizzle of it made Ruth Rose jerk her head backwards, hitting the shelf above her. A toilet roll fell onto her lap, then bounced onto the floor, bumping against a washing pail. She swallowed a yelp. Then, grabbing a broom, she readied to fight her way out if need be. Had she roused him from his trance? Was he alert now at the other end of this rope of silence, ready to tug her out of hiding?

  He spoke again. “You all right?” he whispered.

  Ruth Rose rubbed the sore spot on the back of her head. No, she wanted to answer. But he wasn’t talking to her.

  “It opens up farther along,” he said. “Come on. Hoof it, guys!”

  There was an urgency to his voice. He called out. “Tuffy? Tuffy, you in there?”

  Ruth Rose rocked, soaking up the whispers, her eyes squeezed shut. She knew some of this cast of characters by name only. Tabor, Tuffy, Laverne — she had no idea who they were. Then there was Hub. Hub who was dead now.

  Father cleared his throat, startling her again. Her foot had gone to sleep, her head ached, the smell of the closet nauseated her. There had to be a better way.

  She needed help. She frowned to herself in the dark, her fists clenched on her knees so hard her black fingernails left halfmoon wounds in her palms. She hated the idea of asking anyone for help. But there was someone. If she could just get him to listen.

  1

  From the school bus Jim Hawkins caught sight of the flooded land. The bus was trundling up the cut road.

  There were just the two of them: Everett behind the wheel humming a Prairie Oyster tune and Jim at his usual station, halfway back, nose pressed against the window. Not that he was looking for anything; it was just his way of staying far enough from Eager Everett to avoid a conversation.

  That was how he noticed the glitter of light on water where there shouldn’t have been any.

  The cut road followed the eastern property line of the Hawkins land. It was mostly mixed hardwood down that end, but there was swamp land, fed by a creek. Incognito Creek, his father had called it, because it didn’t draw much attention to itself, didn’t gurgle or splash much. Kind of like Jim himself.

  But no stream, however insignificant, could avoid the detection of a beaver looking to start a home. The flood Jim had glimpsed was in a gulch where his father had cut a trail to a high grazing area at the southeast corner of the farm. The pasture was only a few acres but it would be lost to them if the beavers took the gulch. It wouldn’t be the first time they had tried. It was a natural depression, narrow necked and easy to dam.

  “Podner, we gotta clear the pass of them varmints,” his father used to say, putting on his idea of a cowboy drawl.

  Jim pressed his forehead hard against the cool glass of the bus window. He wasn’t sure he could handle varmints alone.

  He and his mother didn’t need the southeast pasture all that much, he tried to tell himself. They’d sold off the beef cattle; could barely keep up with the few head of dairy they still had. But losing his father had been bad enough. He wasn’t about to see the land stolen out from under them. It had been Hawkins land for five generations. Hadn’t his father said that enough times?

  The cut road came to a T-intersection at the Twelfth Line, and Everett turned west. Jim gathered up his stuff and made his way down the aisle. Everett caught his eye.

  “Corn look in’ good there, Jimbo. No blight. Lar Perkins, he’s got the blight. And him with his bum knee. No Geritol hockey for him this season, eh.”

  Eager Everett. Eye contact was all it rook to flip his switch. Jim smiled in a polite way, and the bus pulled to a stop at his driveway. Everett cranked open the doors.

  “My best to your mother,” he said, tipping his Blue Jays baseball cap. He was like a jay himself once he got squawking.

  The bus rumbled on up the Twelfth until it was swallowed in its own dust. Jim stood at the end of his driveway swallowed up by a memory. Hi
s father waiting right here for him with a pickaxe in one meaty hand and a long-handled spade in the other.

  “You up for some counterinsurgency manoeuvres, son?” Not cowboys this time but some kind of SWAT team.

  Jim had slipped off his backpack right away. “The beavers again, huh?”

  His father had nodded. “Let’s take ’em out, Jimbo.”

  It had been a day not unlike this, early fall. The year before his father vanished.

  Jim crossed the yard and opened the back door before his mother’s shout caught up with him. He looked over towards the driveshed. She was standing in the doorway in coveralls and rubber boots, with a baseball cap on backwards and a paper mask pulled down under her chin. She held a spray can in her hand.

  She made her way towards him across the yard. Behind her in the shadows of the shed stood his father’s car, a ’65 Chevy Malibu, Yuma yellow. She was touching up the bodywork. She was going to sell it, Had to.

  Snoot, their six-month-old kitten, darted out the open kitchen door through Jim’s legs. He swept her up into his arms, watched his mother draw closer, saw her smile through the tiredness on her face. She was working the night shift at the factory. She clomped up onto the porch, made as if to spray him with the primer. He held up the kitten in defence. They laughed. Then he handed Snoot to her, kicked off his shoes and stepped into his rubber boots. She held the kitten like a baby, stroking her dove-grey stomach.

  “Where you headed?” she asked.

  “Beavers have taken the pass,” he said, trying to sound jokey and gruff.

  “Want a hand?”

  Jim shook his head. “I’ll take Gladys. That okay?”

  His mother smiled. “Oh, I’m sure she’ll appreciate it. Doesn’t get much company these days,”

  Jim plonked back down the steps to the yard. “Everett sends his best,” he said without turning. He had to pass on the message, but he didn’t like it. Didn’t like men paying attention to his mother.

  “Why, I think I’ll just phone him right up and ask him over for corn and potato chowder,” she said in a jaunty voice. She posed like a fashion model, glamorous in her black overalls and ball cap, her face freckled with red primer paint. “What’s the use of getting all dolled up if there aren’t any gentlemen callers,” she added, batting her eyelashes.

  Jim managed a chuckle despite himself.

  Gladys stood a little worse for wear in the garden. The garden didn’t need a scarecrow anymore. It was fall-weary, mostly dead but for the pumpkins and carrots. There were still withered scarlet runners clinging like arthritic fingers to the vine, winter squash, a few behemoth zucchini — nothing any bird was about to carry off.

  The scarecrow wore a stained and decrepit white tux, a purple fedora and a pink fright-wig glued to a semi-deflated volleyball head.

  “Hmmm,” said Jim, looking her over. “I’m trying to imagine a beaver frightened enough of you to fly away.” Gladys just grinned.

  With the scarecrow on his shoulder and a shovel in his free hand, Jim walked along the tractor lane through the cornfield. Arnold Tysick and Ormond McCoy from up the line towards Onion Station had helped them plant the corn that spring and had already volunteered to help with the harvest. There hadn’t been a frost yet, but it wouldn’t be long. It took two or three good hard frosts to dry out the feed corn just right.

  Jim was trying to remember stuff like that now. He had helped with the farm work since he was six or so, but he was going to have to pay special attention from now on. In the summer, his mother had found work at the Jergens soap factory in Ladybank. Money was tight. They weren’t sure what they were going to do about the farm. Hold on as best they could, for the time being. There was no way Iris Hawkins would hear of Jim dropping out of school.

  “What would Hub have thought of that?” she had said to him. His father never finished grade eleven, but he regretted it all his life and made up for it as best he could. He had been an avid reader, mostly history.

  “How’re you gonna know what to do if you don’t know what you did?” he used to say. And sometimes he would add in a mocking, grave tone, “Jimbo, history is all we’ve got in this God-forsaken corner of the county.”

  Jim placed Gladys’s gloved hand on his left shoulder and whirled around as if they were dancing. An odd couple — he in gumboots and overalls, Gladys’s tux tails flapping in the bright fall air. He’d seen his dad dance with Gladys.

  The memories came on like this sometimes, like a sweet, sad avalanche. He had learned to ride them out, not to fight them. But there had been a time when the memories had come on so fiercely that they stopped up his throat so he could hardly breathe. For three months he hadn’t been able to talk. Not a word. Only bit by bit did he get his voice back, his life back. But not Hub.

  Crossing the stile into the lower meadow, Gladys’s head fell off.

  “Can’t take you anywhere,” said Jim, leaning the scarecrow torso against the fence. He rescued the volleyball head from the weedy overgrowth, getting a handful of prickles for his troubles.

  As he sat on the stile sucking out the pain, he noticed a Coke can in the long grass. It looked new. He picked it up, looked around. It was too early in the season for hunters. He squashed the can under his boot. Then, having nowhere else to put it, shoved it through the neck hole into Gladys’s head. There was nothing much else in there but rags and pebbles and a few dead moths. He plumped the head back onto her broom-handle neck. It rattled.

  He ploughed on, getting more and more worked up. He didn’t like to think of people trespassing on the farm, didn’t like the idea of strangers sneaking around.

  He stumbled on down the tractor trail into the woodland that separated the cornfields from the low swampy area. He stopped at the threshold of a shadowy place where the woods closed in tight on the road, forming a canopy that blocked the light.

  This was the spot. This was where they found his car.

  Jim took a deep breath, let it out slowly. His lungs filled with the heavy fragrance of cedar.

  The cops found nothing. No signs of a fight. No cigarette butts, no threads — just Dad’s old Malibu, the first car he had ever bought, the keys in the ignition. Outside there was a footprint or two in the muck. They came from a pair of boots Dad always wore. Matched up exactly with footprints in the barnyard.

  After the initial search, volunteers came in droves to help out. Someone found a little tube of lip balm up towards the railway tracks and everyone went crazy as if they’d found a map or something. But it belonged to one of the volunteers who’d combed that part of the woods already. Then, at the fence, they found a tiny fragment of yarn hanging from a barb. The colour matched a sweater Hub had put on that morning. In the swamp land beyond the tracks, they found more of the footprints and, finally, a mile south of the farm, at a water-filled quarry, they found one of his blue handkerchiefs. They dragged the quarry but found no body.

  It was as if Hub Hawkins had been spirited away. It was as if God had dropped down in a spacecraft and whisked him off the face of the earth. “Hey, Hub, we’ve got big beaver problems in heaven. The angels are getting the skirts of their robes wet. We could use some first-hand advice.”

  Jim smiled, but the smile died on him. It was harder and harder to believe his father might somehow, somewhere, still be alive. Jim remembered the tracker dogs, the choppers, the experts from Toronto, the press.

  He looked up as hard and high as he could, but he saw no heaven, no angels with wet skirts. No God.

  Gladys’s head fell off again. He stooped to pick it up. “You know what I think, Gladys? I think you’re kind of like God,” he said. “Something we made up to scare off the crows.”

  After the authorities had given up, Jim came down here, insane with longing, cursing everyone and everything. He came again and again. Fighting back the fear of what he might find or what might find him.

  It was in this cedar glade that he lost his voice. He had been looking around, hoping beyond hope he might spo
t some clue everyone had overlooked. He had gone to call out his father’s name — only nothing came out of his mouth.

  He stopped coming. It had always been a favourite cross-country ski trail. He and his mother found other trails, not that they got out much last winter. In the summer, Lar Perkins came through with his bush hog to keep the trail passable. Never asked to be paid. But Jim never came down this way again. Not until today.

  “What do ya think, Gladys?” he said. He waggled her head up and down and heard the Coke can rattle. The sound fired him up again. Then he stepped into the shadows of the glade and passed through to the light on the other side.

  Before he saw the beaver pond he was walking in it. The road was squelchy wet even though it hadn’t rained for days. He rounded a curve in the rutted lane and there it was, as wide across as a football field and stretching out of sight into the alder scrub on one side and the poplar woods on the other.

  A beaver emerged from the far undergrowth dragging a branch. Jim watched it for a moment. Quietly leaning Gladys against a tree, he raised the business end of the shovel to his shoulder as if it were a rifle.

  “Bang!”

  With a loud slap of its tail the beaver vanished underwater. Jim pretended to blow the smoke off the mouth of the barrel.

  “Take that, you lousy varmint,” he said. Then he headed around the edge of the pond through the submerged grass towards the dam site.

  He knew whatever he did today wouldn’t be enough. The beavers would be back. It was like a hockey game, his father used to say. The fourth period would be sudden death.

  Mud sucking at his boot heels, Jim clambered to the top of the dam and started in chopping at the latticework of branches and sticks that constituted this latest instalment of Hawkins against Nature. The dam was wattle and daub: mud interwoven with grass, weeds and supple willow canes that made the wall hard to tear apart. Putting his back into it, Jim lifted a shovel load that came up with a great sucking sound and the stench of rotten vegetation. The dammed water rushed through the breach.